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These theories never make much sense, because while it's easy to see after the fact that a few key counties could be flipped to change the election, it's comple

These theories never make much sense, because while it's easy to see after the fact that a few key counties could be flipped to change the election, it's completely impossible to predict which ones in advance.

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phobosdeimos 8y ago
Not true. There is a reason why presidential candidates spend more time in bumfuck Ohio than New York City. Swing states are very predictable.
- burkaman 8y ago
  Ohio has 88 counties, Michigan has 83, etc. You know which ones to target in advance? You can't just bribe the Secretary of State or something, you need to infiltrate at a county level and modify the original results or it will be trivial to find out something went wrong.
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  - ryandrake 8y ago
    If your only full time job was to guarantee an election win for a candidate, you would know exactly which counties to target nationwide. There are only so many of them and we have these things called computers...
    - burkaman 8y ago
      No you wouldn't. Many people have full-time jobs trying to predict elections, and they are not nearly accurate enough to zero in on a small number of essential districts. They don't even do very well on the state level. Also, the election landscape shifts constantly, so you can't do this work very far in advance. How long will it take you to set up a system to "hack" Michigan's paper ballots? Even if you somehow perfectly predict the 12 counties necessary to flip the result a year in advance, which again is impossible, can you really infiltrate those counties thoroughly enough to be undetectable? Edit: "your only full time job was to guarantee an election win for a candidate" What you're describing is a campaign manager. You'll notice that during presidential elections, the candidates always have different theories of the electorate and will pick different places to focus their efforts. So either: the losing campaign is always so massively incompetent that they don't even know which states to target, even though you say predicting counties is pretty easy when "we have computers", or elections are actually quite difficult and unpredictable.
      - everdev 8y ago
        Sure, but I think in this theoretical example of someone trying to manipulate an election, they'd pick the top X swing states, which are pretty well known. Of those, they'd pick the top X most populated cities in each swing state. Again, I have not heard anyone say this happened, but I think it's reasonable to assume that the potential attack surface might be fairly small (a few heavily populated counties in a few states) if someone were to want to try. FiveThirtyEight has county by county election data and it's widely discussed on election nights how certain counties vote heavily R or D. You wouldn't be flipping any counties political preference, just minimizing the win % in urban areas might be enough.
        burkaman 8y ago
        Now you're trading a prediction problem for an implementation problem as I explained in another comment. A few heavily populated counties is not a small attack surface. You need to hack hundreds of airgapped optical scanners in each state (and they all use different machines), not too much or too little, because then you'll trigger a recount using the real paper ballots. You still need basically perfect prediction to win and stay undetected, and you're up against big election departments with tons of employees and lots of integrity checks.
  - everdev 8y ago
    Gerrymandering is a thing because politicians and those in the election-economy do have this data. I agree it's a big problem to try to rig the vote in each rural county. But, to go into a metropolitan area and boost or suppress the vote would be easier, especially in states that have only a few big cities. For example, a 10% adjustment in Phoenix might be enough to swing Arizona, as it has about 1/4 of the state's population.
    - burkaman 8y ago
      The bigger the county, the tougher the job. That's why I'm saying this is so difficult; for a realistic hack you'd want to change as few votes as possible. If you really could predict the whole election in advance, you could pick and choose small counties with defeatable systems. Targeting big cities solves the prediction problem, but makes your hack infeasible. Phoenix is in Maricopa County, which used two different types of voting machines in 2016. One of them is a paper ballot optical scanner, which prints out a paper tally at the end of the day. So you'd need to hack hundreds of these airgapped machines, and predict the results well enough to not trigger a recount with your changes, since there are paper ballots to compare against. I think this is just as impossible as choosing key counties in advance.
      - everdev 8y ago
        I guess I'm not familiar with how votes are tallied. Are results visible to election officials in real time as people cast ballots or only at the end? Wouldn't it be feasible to look at a midterm election or registered voters (say you had a 70/30 D/R split) and pre-set a machine to return a 60/40 result?
        burkaman 8y ago
        Depends on the system, but Maricopa County used this machine in 2016, where a polling place official only sees a tally at the end: https://www.verifiedvoting.org/resources/voting-equipment/sequoia/optech-insight/ https://www.verifiedvoting.org/resources/voting-equipment/se... Your idea is feasible if you can break into a warehouse and hack hundreds of these machines, but do you think it's possible to change ~150,000 votes, resulting in a a 10 point swing from recent polls and exit polls, and remain undetected? Remember you're in a big city with lots of news organizations and big elections departments.
freehunter 8y ago
That's assuming polling and research don't exist. That's also assuming that votes can't be flipped as results come in. It's also assuming that a voting machine must flip votes if it's hacked. If the conspiracy is true, the more likely result is these machines can be programmed to only flip a small number of votes, just enough to change the outcome, and only if they need to. Most of the votes will be counted as they were cast, only just enough would need to be flipped. I think we can all imagine that computers can be programmed to perform this logic fairly trivially.
- Karunamon 8y ago
  The results of the 2016 election tell me that polling can be hilariously inaccurate and cannot account for things like the shy tory effect[1]. Everything else you're saying is spot on, though. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shy_Tory_Factor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shy_Tory_Factor
  - learc83 8y ago
    The 2016 polling wasn't close to hilariously inaccurate. The average of the 13 final national polls had Clinton ahead by ~3 points, Clinton won the national vote by ~2. Some individual state polls were more wrong, but they were conducted less frequently and so many of them didn't fully factor in the latest news cycle developments.
    - Karunamon 8y ago
      If those polls were measuring just raw voter preference rather than controlling for state (since the electoral college is what elects the President), we can add "intentionally dishonest" to the list of problems. "Who will win the popular vote" can be a datapoint since more often than not they line up, but it is absolutely less important overall. Even if we exclude mendacity and downgrade that to mere irresponsibility, terms like "98% chance of Hillary winning" were being thrown around left and right on election day. That speaks to something very, very wrong in how that data was being collected.
rlucas 8y ago
That's not how it works. Votes are typically collected and tabulated in a county, but that state's electors are generally allocated by a majority popular vote, aggregating all counties (a few states do proportional). "Winning" a county doesn't matter; winning the state does. You could get the extra votes to win a state from a big county without flipping it.
- burkaman 8y ago
  I know, but as I've said in other comments, hacking a big county is much harder. There are hundreds of polling places and machines, thousands of officials, news organizations conducting exit polls and watching live results, and probably good polls conducted just before the election. It's much more appealing to pick a few smaller counties with limited to no polling and easily exploitable systems, so you can remain undetected. If you concentrate your efforts in a few highly populated and highly watched counties, it'll be obvious.

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phobosdeimos 8y ago

Not true. There is a reason why presidential candidates spend more time in bumfuck Ohio than New York City. Swing states are very predictable.

burkaman 8y ago
Ohio has 88 counties, Michigan has 83, etc. You know which ones to target in advance? You can't just bribe the Secretary of State or something, you need to infiltrate at a county level and modify the original results or it will be trivial to find out something went wrong.
- deleted 8y ago
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- ryandrake 8y ago
  If your only full time job was to guarantee an election win for a candidate, you would know exactly which counties to target nationwide. There are only so many of them and we have these things called computers...
  - burkaman 8y ago
    No you wouldn't. Many people have full-time jobs trying to predict elections, and they are not nearly accurate enough to zero in on a small number of essential districts. They don't even do very well on the state level. Also, the election landscape shifts constantly, so you can't do this work very far in advance. How long will it take you to set up a system to "hack" Michigan's paper ballots? Even if you somehow perfectly predict the 12 counties necessary to flip the result a year in advance, which again is impossible, can you really infiltrate those counties thoroughly enough to be undetectable? Edit: "your only full time job was to guarantee an election win for a candidate" What you're describing is a campaign manager. You'll notice that during presidential elections, the candidates always have different theories of the electorate and will pick different places to focus their efforts. So either: the losing campaign is always so massively incompetent that they don't even know which states to target, even though you say predicting counties is pretty easy when "we have computers", or elections are actually quite difficult and unpredictable.
    - everdev 8y ago
      Sure, but I think in this theoretical example of someone trying to manipulate an election, they'd pick the top X swing states, which are pretty well known. Of those, they'd pick the top X most populated cities in each swing state. Again, I have not heard anyone say this happened, but I think it's reasonable to assume that the potential attack surface might be fairly small (a few heavily populated counties in a few states) if someone were to want to try. FiveThirtyEight has county by county election data and it's widely discussed on election nights how certain counties vote heavily R or D. You wouldn't be flipping any counties political preference, just minimizing the win % in urban areas might be enough.
      - burkaman 8y ago
        Now you're trading a prediction problem for an implementation problem as I explained in another comment. A few heavily populated counties is not a small attack surface. You need to hack hundreds of airgapped optical scanners in each state (and they all use different machines), not too much or too little, because then you'll trigger a recount using the real paper ballots. You still need basically perfect prediction to win and stay undetected, and you're up against big election departments with tons of employees and lots of integrity checks.
- everdev 8y ago
  Gerrymandering is a thing because politicians and those in the election-economy do have this data. I agree it's a big problem to try to rig the vote in each rural county. But, to go into a metropolitan area and boost or suppress the vote would be easier, especially in states that have only a few big cities. For example, a 10% adjustment in Phoenix might be enough to swing Arizona, as it has about 1/4 of the state's population.
  - burkaman 8y ago
    The bigger the county, the tougher the job. That's why I'm saying this is so difficult; for a realistic hack you'd want to change as few votes as possible. If you really could predict the whole election in advance, you could pick and choose small counties with defeatable systems. Targeting big cities solves the prediction problem, but makes your hack infeasible. Phoenix is in Maricopa County, which used two different types of voting machines in 2016. One of them is a paper ballot optical scanner, which prints out a paper tally at the end of the day. So you'd need to hack hundreds of these airgapped machines, and predict the results well enough to not trigger a recount with your changes, since there are paper ballots to compare against. I think this is just as impossible as choosing key counties in advance.
    - everdev 8y ago
      I guess I'm not familiar with how votes are tallied. Are results visible to election officials in real time as people cast ballots or only at the end? Wouldn't it be feasible to look at a midterm election or registered voters (say you had a 70/30 D/R split) and pre-set a machine to return a 60/40 result?
      - burkaman 8y ago
        Depends on the system, but Maricopa County used this machine in 2016, where a polling place official only sees a tally at the end: https://www.verifiedvoting.org/resources/voting-equipment/sequoia/optech-insight/ https://www.verifiedvoting.org/resources/voting-equipment/se... Your idea is feasible if you can break into a warehouse and hack hundreds of these machines, but do you think it's possible to change ~150,000 votes, resulting in a a 10 point swing from recent polls and exit polls, and remain undetected? Remember you're in a big city with lots of news organizations and big elections departments.

freehunter 8y ago

That's assuming polling and research don't exist. That's also assuming that votes can't be flipped as results come in. It's also assuming that a voting machine must flip votes if it's hacked. If the conspiracy is true, the more likely result is these machines can be programmed to only flip a small number of votes, just enough to change the outcome, and only if they need to. Most of the votes will be counted as they were cast, only just enough would need to be flipped. I think we can all imagine that computers can be programmed to perform this logic fairly trivially.

Karunamon 8y ago
The results of the 2016 election tell me that polling can be hilariously inaccurate and cannot account for things like the shy tory effect[1]. Everything else you're saying is spot on, though. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shy_Tory_Factor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shy_Tory_Factor
- learc83 8y ago
  The 2016 polling wasn't close to hilariously inaccurate. The average of the 13 final national polls had Clinton ahead by ~3 points, Clinton won the national vote by ~2. Some individual state polls were more wrong, but they were conducted less frequently and so many of them didn't fully factor in the latest news cycle developments.
  - Karunamon 8y ago
    If those polls were measuring just raw voter preference rather than controlling for state (since the electoral college is what elects the President), we can add "intentionally dishonest" to the list of problems. "Who will win the popular vote" can be a datapoint since more often than not they line up, but it is absolutely less important overall. Even if we exclude mendacity and downgrade that to mere irresponsibility, terms like "98% chance of Hillary winning" were being thrown around left and right on election day. That speaks to something very, very wrong in how that data was being collected.

rlucas 8y ago

That's not how it works. Votes are typically collected and tabulated in a county, but that state's electors are generally allocated by a majority popular vote, aggregating all counties (a few states do proportional). "Winning" a county doesn't matter; winning the state does. You could get the extra votes to win a state from a big county without flipping it.

burkaman 8y ago
I know, but as I've said in other comments, hacking a big county is much harder. There are hundreds of polling places and machines, thousands of officials, news organizations conducting exit polls and watching live results, and probably good polls conducted just before the election. It's much more appealing to pick a few smaller counties with limited to no polling and easily exploitable systems, so you can remain undetected. If you concentrate your efforts in a few highly populated and highly watched counties, it'll be obvious.